Hall of Fame Postcard Find

I found these two gems at the local flea market this weekend. I braved the pouring rain (rain! in Georgia! can ya believe it?) because I needed the Frenchy Bordagary card featured in day three of my Twelve Days of Cardmas. Frenchy cards was one of the first things I thought of when I came up with the idea because I thought I had an original '36 Goudey wide pen card of Stan in my collection. I got the cards together to scan, and, oops - no Frenchy. The idea falls flat without the craziest Frenchy in baseball, so I relied on the guy with tons and tons of old reprints at the market. I finally found his TCMA reprint underneath a pile of porno mags in a box of vintage players. My collection felt incomplete without a card of Frenchy and I spent a rough night wondering where I would find a card of one of the goofiest players to don a uniform.

While I was there, I scrounged through his old Topps cards for missing cards from my The 792 set (he had an '81 Topps Ozzie Smith Record Breaker card with round corners for 5 bucks - no thanks), snagged another football brick, peeked at a couple of the magazines, and found a box of Hall of Fame Postcards for a buck a piece. They were a bit warped and possibly water damaged, but I found two I had to get:

This first one of Cuban Negro League superstar Martin Dihigo is from a Hall of Fame postcard set by Dexter Press. These weren't printed for all that long so they are much more scare than the yellow postcards we all know and love. They look pretty nice though, although it is pretty hard to get a good autograph on the front. a few years back I had a chance to get a really obscure Cuban card of Dihigo, but I passed it up because I didn't know what the heck it was. I still don't know what that card was, but after reading up on Martin's brilliant playing days, I regretted not buying it. I love cards of Negro Leaguers so this was an easy purchase.

The other postcard I got was a Jackie Robinson card from the more familiar Yellow border postcard set. These are the ones you can pick up at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown for about a quarter a piece. They also have complete sets for something like 50 bucks. These are pretty common and my 5 year old SCD price guide lists them all at 50 cents each in near mint condition. While any card of Jackie is a good card in my opinion, this one is admittedly pretty beat up as you can see in the scan. So why did I just pay a buck for a postcard I probably got for a quarter on my last trip to Cooperstown? This is why:

It has a Jackie Robinson commemorative stamp on the back canceled the first day of issue on August 2, 1982. Now that's pretty cool.